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‘It was very hard to see myself as a director’: the Australian film-maker changing the documentary genre

Gabrielle Brady’s docufiction hybrids have earned international recognition even as her home country has been slow to catch up. For her latest, she worked with a Mongolian couple displaced from their farmlandGet our weekend culture and lifestyle email“There are so many hang-ups in the documentary world about this idea of ultimate truth,” says Gabrielle Brady. “There’s only subjectivity in documentary. It’s all a construction.”Ever since Louis Lumière filmed workers leaving his factory in 1895, documentary film has struggled with the idea of authenticity. Lumière’s 17-metre film is regarded as the first ever made yet even this modest document is a lie: it was filmed not on a work day but a Sunday. The ethnographer Robert Flaherty staged scenes in his 1922 documentary Nanook of the North, and it was Michael Moore’s crafty editing that made Roger and Me an emotive box office hit. Continue reading...

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